The Years of Fire (22 page)

“You’re not going far, I hope,” the driver said, giving them a suspicious look. “The streets will be totally blocked soon. You got enough money?” he added when Lachapelle gave him the address.

“If I don’t have enough money for a cab, I walk,” Steve said, piqued.

René De Bané was playing alone in the otherwise empty room. He welcomed Steve and Charles the way a castaway on a desert island might welcome a buxom blonde carrying a barbecued chicken and a case of wine.

“Holy cow!” he said. “A royal visit! It’s been ages since I’ve seen you guys! You just get out of jail or something?”

“Yeah,” said Charles. “We had your old cell.”

After laughing heartily at Charles’s repartee, De Bané asked them what was new, told them how good they were looking, thanked Fate for having sent them to him on such a miserable day, and went over to the counter to confer with Nadine. He came back with three bottles of beer, and the game began. It was an animated, enjoyable session, punctuated by hilarious jokes and spectacular shots that allowed each player to share the limelight in turn. Charles was delighted to have hooked up with Steve again. His friend still clowned around and acted on impulse, and the fact that he’d come into town on purpose to spend time with him felt good, especially since, as he reproached himself, he had almost forgotten about Lachapelle. As for De Bané, the man couldn’t be friendly enough. He laughed at the smallest joke his companions made, marvelled at their
skill, and was generous with his tips for playing championship pool, since, as he said, “you have to give a leg up to the next generation, especially when they’re as talented as you two.”

Around four o’clock they began to feel hungry, and De Bané, as usual, invited them to join him at a restaurant. He insisted on driving them to the Villa Frontenac, despite the weather, where they feasted on smoked-meat sandwiches, fries, ice cream, and chocolate cake.

“You must be rolling in dough, René,” Charles said, leaning back in his chair, stuffed.

“It’s not hard when you know how to use your head,” De Bané replied with a secretive smile. “Coffee? Hot chocolate? Come on, drink up, it’s on me!”

“Tell me something, René,” Steve said, very directly. “Are you queer, or what?” He wiggled his hips like a belly dancer, holding his elbows above the table. “Because if you are, my ass isn’t for sale.”

“Nor mine,” added Charles, becoming serious.

“You guys kidding me?” De Bané sputtered, almost choking on a mouthful of chocolate cake. When he got his breath back he assured them he was nothing of the kind, that he had fathered five children with three different women, that he liked a bit of poontang as much as they did, if not more, that nothing pissed him off more than running into one of those kiddie-diddlers, and he’d kicked the stuffing out of more than his share of them in bars and pool halls and other, similar places.

They finished their meal. De Bané suggested going back to the Orleans for another game, on him, of course, because he loved playing against really skilled opponents. But Charles and Steve declined his invitation, saying they had other things to do.

“You still working at that pharmacy, Charles?” he asked when Steve had left the table to make a phone call.

“Yup. I took today off, but normally I’m there every Saturday and one or two nights during the week.”

Intrigued by the question, Charles looked at De Bané through partly closed lids.

“If you’re interested, we could do some business, you and I,” De Bané said.

“Business?”

“Business, yeah. Smooth as shit and twice as easy. You could make a lot of money, and do it with your eyes closed.”

“Oh yeah? How?”

His suspicious and somewhat sarcastic tone brought a smile that split the pool shark’s long face in two.

“Maybe this isn’t the best time to talk about it. I don’t want to keep you too long. But take a couple of days to think about my proposition, Charlie, my boy. If you’re interested, let me know. You know where to find me.”

“He’s selling dope,” Steve said when Charles told him about the conversation. “Watch yourself, buddy. You could end up in shit up to your neck.”

Charles shrugged. “Thanks for the advice,” he said. “I’ll give it some thought.”

The storm had nearly passed. Steve had called Louisa, his girlfriend from Haiti, whom he had met that summer in Pointe-Saint-Charles, and convinced her to come and join them. The three of them walked to Marlene’s place; Charles hadn’t seen her for nearly two weeks. She didn’t seem to hold it against him, and gave him a long, wet kiss on the mouth. Louisa was a little bit of a thing, very bubbly and nervous. It was her first winter in Quebec. The snowstorm had sent her into a fit of ecstasy from which nothing could bring her down. She wanted to go outside and play. Marlene looked at her with a condescending smile.

“We could make a snow fort,” Steve suggested, anxious to please his girlfriend.

“The snow won’t stick,” Marlene objected. “It’s too cold.”

“We just have to spray it with a hose,” Charles said. “The fort will be there until spring. We could even sell it to Club Med!”

They frolicked in the snow until it was too dark to see, stacking blocks of snow and laughing like children. Every now and then they dashed into the apartment to warm up with cups of coffee. Finally, Louisa, exhausted by the cold, nearly fell asleep on the sofa.

So they devoted the rest of the night to other occupations.

I
n the middle of the night of May 6th a fire broke out behind the storage shed at the Fafard hardware store. A chartered accountant, unable to sleep, was out walking his dog when he saw the plume of smoke rising above the courtyard and small, short flames flickering diabolically beneath a barred window. “Hey!” he shouted in indignation. He was the son, grandson, and great-grandson of firefighters, and so he came from a family that considered fire a hereditary enemy, the defeat of which was a moral duty. He therefore ran to the nearest front door and banged on it with his fist. When there was no response, he tried the handle and the door swung open.

“Fire! Fire!” he shouted, running into a darkened room. “Someone please call the Fire Department!”

He saw a wall-mounted telephone in the kitchen, faintly lit by the glow of a night-light. He ran to it and was performing his duty as a good citizen when he became aware of a small, old woman watching him from the doorway, trembling in her pink, cotton nightgown. He signalled to her to go to the window in the living room to see what was happening in the street, and then returned his attention to the phone. A second “Hey!” – muted this time – followed by “Have mercy on us, Sweet Jesus” told him that the reason for his unannounced intrusion into this woman’s house was now sufficiently clear for there to be no disagreeable scene. He hung up, gently patted his involuntary hostess on the shoulder (her dentures clacking at the sight of so much smoke in the street), then went back
outside and joined the small group of gawkers that had assembled in front of the store. Within minutes, sirens from the fire trucks were waking up the entire neighbourhood.

All this time, Fernand had been lying in his bed with his teeth clenched and his arms and legs held rigid, swerving violently back and forth at the wheel of a huge eighteen-wheeler on the Turcot Interchange, which hardly seemed a plausible thing to be doing, given that he’d never driven such a truck in his life. In any case, when Lucie woke him to tell him that the hardware store was on fire, he was already in the appropriate state of mind for receiving the news. He was outside the store in a matter of minutes, plunged in gloom, his wife at his side, along with his two children and Charles, whose expression of anger and distress attracted wondering glances from several of the onlookers.

Fernand never knew which good soul he had to thank for the speed with which the firemen had been called; by the time he arrived the fire was already well under control and the good soul in question had gone home to try to catch a couple of hours of sleep, exhausted by his efforts and satisfied that the Enemy had been delivered a crushing defeat.

The fire damaged one wall and destroyed some merchandise. It had been halted next to a flat of paints, solvents, and thinners, which, had it caught fire, would have turned the storage shed into a blazing inferno and the hardware store into a hazy memory. There was considerable water and smoke damage, however. The source of the fire had been destroyed as well, as often happens, theoretically removing the evidence that a crime had even been committed. The claims adjuster, when called in first thing in the morning, estimated the damage at ten thousand dollars and congratulated Fernand on his good fortune.

“Such as it is,” muttered the hardware store owner darkly.

Lucie, her face pale and the cords in her throat standing out like those of an old woman, took her husband’s arm encouragingly.

But Fernand was devastated. He might have been lucky this time, but there would surely be a next time, and fortune might not be so kind in the future. He walked through the store muttering unintelligibly to himself,
his face sagging, looking lost. Henri watched him in silence, visibly distraught. His father seemed to have aged ten years in a few hours; the barrel-chested colossus had changed into a broken shell of a man. Lucie sat on the counter, her legs dangling, her sandals hanging from her toes, wiping her eyes with a dustcloth, while Charles and Céline went out to clean up the storage shed.

Charles stopped suddenly in front of Céline, a dustpan piled with debris in his hand, his lower jaw protruding, and his face ugly with rage.

“He won’t get away with this, Céline,” he said in a strangled voice. “I’ll make sure of that.”

“What are you going to do?”

All he could do then was shake his head and go back to work in silence. Half an hour later, however, after hastily gulping down the breakfast Lucie had ordered from a nearby restaurant, he left for school. During the morning break he took Blonblon aside and told him what had happened; he had to speak to someone about it, if only to dilute his anger and his fear.

“I’ll go look for him,” Blonblon said, in a spirit of noble generosity. “I’m going to try to reconcile the two of you. Yes, Charles, we have to try. I don’t like to get mixed up in your business, but it won’t be hard for me to act as a kind of intermediary, try to negotiate some kind of … Charles! Listen to me, Charles, please: you’ve got to talk to him. It’s always better to talk than to fight! The worst that can happen is that I waste my time. But fighting …” He shook his head sympathetically.

Charles heard him out, open-mouthed, touched by Blonblon’s candour. But he turned the offer down flat.

“Please, Charles,” Blonblon begged. “At least let me try. What have you got to lose?”

“Blonblon, you’re getting on my nerves. You sound like a Jehovah’s Witness or something. What, are you going door to door now? We’re not in kindergarten any more, this isn’t about settling a little set- to in the hallway. Smell the coffee, man! My father is a total asshole! He’s already tried to kill me, or have you forgotten that little detail? It was thanks to him that I had to change families. He doesn’t work because he’s no longer
capable of working. All he does is drink or take drugs, or both for all I know, and he needs money, lots of money, and he’ll do anything he can to get it. He proved that last night, Blonblon. It’s a miracle the store wasn’t burned to the ground and Fernand isn’t a ruined man. By going to see him, all you’ll do is warn him that I’m coming after him. You’ll make what I have to do twice as difficult.”

“You’re going at it the wrong way, Charles. And you’ll regret it.”

“I’d regret doing nothing even more.”

“I know how to talk to people, Charles. You’ve seen me do it before. Just last Thursday, Laframboise wanted to punch Mathieu Laplante’s face in because he thought Laplante had stolen his girlfriend. Well, I talked to him for fifteen minutes, quietly, explaining to him that you can’t steal a girl from someone the way you steal a jackknife or a bicycle. I told him the real problem must have been between him and his girlfriend, and it was her he should talk to, ask her what went wrong. I told him,
ask
her what went wrong, don’t try to strangle it out of her, or drag her down the street by the hair. You don’t get anywhere by fighting. When you ask questions, you might get a few answers, you might learn something. Then you can fix whatever it is that isn’t working.”

“Where did you get that from,
The Watchtower?”

“I didn’t get it from anywhere, Charles. It came from my own head. And you know what Laframboise did? He took my advice. Phaneuf told me yesterday, he saw him and Doris in the Lafayette Restaurant, and things seemed to have been patched up. What do you have to say to that, Charles?”

“Laframboise is not my father.”

“When you manage to find the right words, Charles, you can almost always reach what is good in a person – and there is some good in all of us, believe me.”

“Not in my father, not any more. Once, maybe. But it’s been completely eaten up by the bad stuff. He’s an asshole, Blonblon.”

And he ended the discussion by telling Blonblon that any attempted intervention between him and his father would be the end of their friendship. Blonblon bowed his head and sighed, and they went in to class.

That evening Charles went to the Orleans. He had no particular plan of action in mind. All he knew was that he was going to need a lot of money in a hurry. Nothing could get in his way.

René De Bané was sitting at a table, drinking beer. There were two young men with him, both with scraggly moustaches and bony faces. They looked like brothers. Charles hadn’t seen them before. When De Bané saw Charles, he cheerfully waved his long monkey-arms.

“Charlie, my boy! Good ol’ Charlie! Come over and have a beer with us!”

He introduced Charles to his two companions, who looked vaguely over at him and went on with their conversation.

“I wanted to talk to you,” Charles murmured to De Bané as he took his place at the table.

“I could tell just by looking at you, Charlie boy, and I’m not in the least surprised. You’re a smart kid, and a smart kid never lets a good opportunity pass him by. Sorry, boys,” he said, turning to the two young men, “but I’m going to have to catch you later. Charlie and I have a few things to talk about.”